The PGA Tour can feel Your eyes roll.

For all its (sometimes) lumbering corporate might, the tour doesn’t need new chief marketing officer Andy Weitz to know that Friday morning’s news – the announcement of the formation of the all-new “Creator Council” – will come through with a healthy dose of that snore.

If a company’s most important job is to understand the consumer, then the PGA Tour knows it’s not for everyone. In fact, it knows that a crossover episode between the Tour and golf’s most prominent influencers will land like a 6-iron to the skull with a certain subset of the core demographic.

But it is crucial that the tour also understands the crisis in professional golf. The symptoms of this disease are many – the explosion of LIV, the incursion of rogue billionaires into golf, the slow decline of the golf TV product, the genericization of the league and the loss of Tiger Woods – but the result is unique: After After five After decades of rapid growth, professional golf is increasing and its audience is shrinking.

That is Why the Tour is OK was announced with a few eye rolls on Friday morning, the same day it announced a partnership with seven golf social media brands to launch the brand new “Creator Council,” where influencers will share strategies and insights exchange with the tour exchange for improved access to events and content creation opportunities. The group is expected to meet regularly with PGA Tour leadership, including Weitz, to discuss fan engagement opportunities, content strategy and broadcast improvements, among other things.

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The agreement is old-fashioned Consideration – There is no money involved and it is not needed. For the tour, the benefits of combining nearly limitless scope with the institutional content knowledge of the creator community are obvious. For those who love golf enough to secure the job title of Content Creator, the benefits of working with the Tour are even greater: exclusive Access content from the long heavily regulated fairways of PGA Tour events and a taste of the tons of viral content that comes with it.

That may not sound like much, but it was enough to get partners with more than 15 million combined followers to sign up, including Bryan Bros Golf, Erik Anders Lang, Foreplay/Barstool Sports, No Laying Up, Paige Spiranac, Roger Steele and Tisha Alyn.

“We want to learn from the creators,” Weitz told GOLF.com. “First, we want to give them access (to us) because we recognize that there are some places where we can do better with our own voice. Second, there are opportunities to co-create and give fans even more of what they want. And third, there may be situations where creators should lead, and we need to give them access to our platform to do that.”

The program represents a continuation of the PGA Tour’s recent push into new media, which has seen content creators delight scores of young fans to watch golf content and thereby defy the sport’s reputation as an old man’s game. Bringing some of that digital audience to the tour represents a huge opportunity for the tour company, which derives most of its annual revenue from media rights deals tied to the size of its TV audience. At the most basic level, more followers and subscribers mean more fans, and fans are good for business.

The occasion helps explain the tour’s recent trial balloons, such as the Creator Classic, a televised influencer outing that drew several million views, and Skratch, a digital media brand whose revival is underway Full of momentum EP Chad Mumm received millions in seed funding from the tour. It also explains some of the core elements of the Creator Council, including expanding the Creator Classic to include additional tour events and working to relax media regulations.

Notably, many of the Creator Council’s first invitees come from the booming world of YouTube golf. The biggest irony is that the PGA Tour’s official YouTube members (1.5 million) have fewer followers than former PGA Tour member Bryson DeChambeau (1.63 million), who partially left the tour to join LIV to maintain his own media presence. DeChambeau may be an outlier among his fellow pro golfers for his presentation skills, and the YouTube algorithm may boost individual YouTubers, but there is little debate from either side that the Tour’s combined power represents an opportunity for a YouTube audience , which is many times larger than any other single player.

There are still questions about the ultimate value of a large YouTube audience — many YouTubers say the most profitable parts of their business are merchandise sales and direct sponsorships, not YouTube ad dollars — but there’s little doubt that every eyeball matters for the PGA Tour in times of declining ratings and tour wars.

“This idea didn’t start with the business case. “This idea started as an opportunity to better understand what our fans expect from the PGA Tour,” Weitz said. “If we engage fans correctly, if we understand how they consume content and how they engage with other aspects of the golf landscape, we can ultimately provide them with a better service. And yes, that would be better for our business. But this is about changing the way we think about interacting with our fan base.”

engagement has been a popular word at Tour headquarters this fall, especially as Weitz and Co. work through the results of the first-ever Fan Forward Survey — a pilot program designed to gather fan feedback on PGA Tour broadcasts. In that spirit, the Creator Council represents an expansion of efforts aimed this time around at gathering feedback from some of the tour’s most valuable outsiders.

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Of course the council has a competitive advantage. LIV’s success on YouTube is no small feat, and the league’s players have already benefited from partnerships with some of the biggest names in YouTube golf. (Last week, Phil Mickelson announced a two-on-two content series with wildly popular YouTuber Grant Horvat.) By securing a functioning group with Not only does the tour gain strategic insight, it also protects its own rear. But it’s not so easy to curry favor either – some of the tour’s first council members have also been some of its most vocal critics in recent years.

“Ultimately, this is about the forum,” Weitz said. “This is about creating a place where the creators of the tour can come together, where we can learn from each other and perform better on behalf of the fans.”

Ultimately, the Council may not bring much progress. Some issues associated with the PGA Tour’s media business, such as: B. Commercials are responsible for the enormous amounts of money the tour generates. Other issues, such as managing PGA Tour media regulations’ property and possessions, could cause significant headaches for Tour executives. But if nothing else, Friday’s announcement points to concrete evidence that the Tour is taking action to address the most obvious problems that plagued its existence in the LIV era.

This may not be everything you’re looking for, but it is what it is something – and something is good at the moment.

Even if it makes you roll your eyes.

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